The Value of Everything

A work of tremendous ambition, academic rigor, and originality, The Value of Everything argues that American companies have for too long been valued according to the amount of wealth they capture for themselves rather than for the value they create for the economy. In fact, Pfizer, Amazon, and countless other companies that claim to drive innovation are actually hopelessly dependent on public money, spend their resources on boosting share prices and executive pay, and reap ever-expanding rewards without offering the market real value. Such parasitic behavior is only getting worse: leading American companies are profiting from the redistribution of wealth and knowledge without giving anything back to the communities that have made them so profitable.

In her previous groundbreaking and controversial work, The Entrepreneurial State, Mariana Mazzucato argued that public investment has been the most significant driver of innovation and product development. The iPhone as it exists would not have been possible without government-sponsored technology like Siri, GPS, the Internet, and Touch ID. Yet Apple today, like numerous other technology and biotech companies, is engaging in a massive repurchase scheme, and for the first time has prioritized value-extraction practices such as spending to boost shareholder profit and lobbying to diminish the state and its tax policies-the very initiatives that funded their software.If private companies continue down this path, they will succeed in diminishing the size of their largest and most successful investor-the state-and will destroy powerful opportunities, shrivel markets, and depress wealth. The lesson here is urgent and sobering: to rescue our economy from the next, inevitable crisis and foster long-term economic growth, we will need to rethink capitalism, rethink the state rather than downsize it, and redefine how we measure value in our society.

What's Inside

Praise

"Mazzucato's ideas are fuel for a growing political debate about what portion of the country's wealth pie should be taken by the private sector." --Rana Foroohar, TIME

"Read her book. It will challenge your thinking."-Bruce Upbin, Forbes

"It is one of the most incisive economic books in years." --Jeff Madrick, New York Review of Books

"Mariana Mazzucato makes a very convincing argument . . . . from the iPhone to solar power to nanotechnology to pharmaceuticals, government did much of the basic research before venture capitalists stepped in and took the profit." --Los Angeles Review of Books, Tom Streithorst

"Increasingly, however, economists and social thinkers are challenging the conventional wisdom on innovation... Mariana Mazzucato described the most notable technology innovations as coming from the government, not the private sector." --Quentin Hardy, New York Times

Praise for The Entrepreneurial State

"This book has a controversial thesis. But it is basically right. The failure to recognise the role of the government in driving innovation may well be the greatest threat to rising prosperity." --Martin Wolf, Financial Times

"Mariana Mazzucato ... has built up an ever bigger following for The Entrepreneurial State, which argues that government has played a big role in creating innovation . . . . It's a serious book, and its subject is an important one. Where innovation comes from is one of the most important, and perhaps least understood, topics in economics." --Matthew Lynn, The Telegraph

"[M]ost major technological advances of the last decades have been publicly financed. As Mariana Mazzucato shows in The Entrepreneurial State, all the major advances that made the iPhone possible were publicly funded, from the touch screen to GPS." --Doug Henwood, The Nation

"The iPhone exists--as Mariana Mazzucato demonstrated in her book--because various branches of the US government provided research assistance that resulted in several key technological developments . . . . " --Jill Lepore, The New Yorker

Praise for The Entrepreneurial State

"Ms Mazzucato is right to argue that the state has played a role in producing game-changing breakthroughs, and that its contribution to the success of technology-based businesses should not be underestimated." --Schumpeter column, The Economist

"The US government has a conscious policy of picking winners and it works, says Professor Mazzucato, because it has a willingness to fail and an expertise which comes from having done this kind of thing for years." --Anthony Hilton, The Independent

"I have seen the next big thing, and it is Mariana Mazzucato . . . . an economist whose innovative ideas are so insightful, so well-informed, and so right that they stand in terrifying contrast to almost everything that most Americans in 2013 hold dear." --Dan Kervick, New Economic Perspectives

Mariana Mazzucato is Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London (UCL) where she is also Founder and Director of the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. She is author of the highly-acclaimed book The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths, and winner of the 2014 New Statesman SPERI Prize in Political Economy, the 2015 Hans-Matthöfer-Preis and the 2018 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. She has advised policymakers around the world on how to deliver ‘smart’, inclusive and sustainable growth. In 2013 she was named as one of the ‘3 most important thinkers about innovation’ in the New Republic.